Reading Into the Past, Take One

I've been keeping a reading notebook for more than a decade now, so I thought it would be interesting to periodically check and see what I was reading the same week in past years. (To see if I can remember any of those books, for one thing.) Since I'm on vacation this week, this seems like a good project to keep me out of trouble.

I seem to have been on vacation regularly this time of year, which means I also read a lot of comics collections and similar stuff most of these weeks. To keep this list from getting ridiculously long, I'm not listing them here. But I think I'll do a comics-review roundup soon, of books I've recently read. Comments for or against this plan will be carefully read and possibly heeded. I'm also only listing books finished from 10-25 to 10/31 each year, not things I read part of and quit, or books that I was reading over a longer period of time.

So, the last week of October 2004, I was reading:

• Orphanage by Robert Buettner (finished 10/31)
• Florence of Arabia
by Christopher Buckley (10/28)
• Queenan Country
by Joe Queenan (10/27)
• Created in Darkness by Troubled Americans
edited by Dave Eggers and others (10/25)

Orphanage was a fun military SF novel (as was its sequel), but I think I enjoyed it most because it was quick-moving and had an engaging first-person narrator. I don't remember Florence very strongly, but it was funny, if not as good as Buckley's best (still Thank You for Smoking). Queenan Country is also an example of a pleasant book by a writer who can do better; Queenan was my favorite bilous writer of the mid-'90s, but he's mellowed a bit in recent years. I remember enjoying Created in Darkness, but nothing of the specific pieces included in it.

And the last week of October 2003, I was reading:

• Swords Against Wizardry and The Swords of Lankhmar by Fritz Leiber (10/29 and 10/31)
• Schott's Original Miscellany by Ben Schott (10/27)
• Star Wars: Survivor's Quest by Timothy Zahn (10/27)

I was re-reading the Leiber books for a re-issue of an omnibus edition of the "Fafhrd & Grey Mouser" stories in the SFBC, and they were just as good as I'd remembered. (Though I hadn't really noticed the kinky sex when I read them as a teenager, the first time around.) Schott's is what it is; it's a particularly well-chosen and well-designed bathroom book, and there's certainly a place for those. Survivor's Quest is not my favorite Star Wars book; it was pretty unnecessary and wasn't all that zippy to boot.

And the last week of October 2002, I was reading:

• Sabriel by Garth Nix (10/31)
• The Cheese Monkeys by Chip Kidd (10/29)
• Altered Carbon by Richard K. Morgan (10/27)
• The Science of Discworld II: The Globe by Terry Pratchett, Ian Stewart and Jack Cohen (10/25)

I read that whole trilogy by Nix (Sabriel, Lirael and Abhorsen) pretty quickly, liked them, and did an omnibus edition in the SFBC. Cheese Monkeys was yet another Bildungsroman, done reasonably well, and wondering how close it was to Kidd's own life made it more interesting. Science of Discworld II was not as good as I but better than III, which is the way of such things. The first one was a real gem of popular science (well, popular in the UK, at least; it wasn't even published in the States), and this one didn't hit those heights but still had plenty of informative bits presented nicely.

And the last week of October 2001, I was reading:

• The Hoboken Chicken Emergency by Daniel Pinkwater (10/31)
• and a whole bunch of art books without much text. Guess I was feeling lazy that year...

And that's OK, since I'm lazy this year, too. I like Pinkwater's Young Adult books better than his middle-grade books, and Hoboken was one of the latter. It was OK, but it's no Young Adult Novel.

And the last week of October 2000, I was reading:

• The Wooden Sea by Jonathan Carroll (10/29)
• The Midnight Man by Loren D. Estelman (10/27)
• Dave Barry Is Not Taking This Sitting Down! by Guess Who (10/26)
• Beyond World's End by Mercedes Lackey and Rosemary Edghill (10/25)

I'm afraid I can't differentiate Wooden Sea from any other Carroll novel at this point. Similarly, I know Midnight Man is an Amos Walker mystery (a pleasant hardboiled series I was reading a bunch of that year) , but couldn't say what happened in that one. The Dave Barry book was a collection of columns, which I have a weakness for (the recent Going Nucular appealed to me for similar reasons). And World's End was one of the "Bedlam's Bard" series, which is harmless fluff for modern pagans who want to feel superior to things. (And don't we all want to feel superior to things once in a while?)

And the last week of October 1999, I was reading:

• The Burning City by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle (10/31)
• How To Lie With Statistics by Darrell Huff (10/29)
• The Book on the Bookshelf by Henry Petroski (10/28)
• The Big Con by David W. Maurer (10/26)
• Double Billing by Cameron Stracher (10/25)

Burning City has gone down the memory hole entirely. How To Lie is a modern classic, and a book everyone should read. Bookshelf is an engineer's look at the usability of books and book-holding devices (as I recall), and was the first Petroski I read. (Or did I get to To Engineer Is Human, the most important and best Petroski book, first?) The Big Con was non-fiction; I think a semi-biography about a con man. Not exactly; it's a 1940 book about con men, and is generally considered the classic of the genre. Double Billing looks completely unfamiliar; I don't remember it at all. Amazon says that's is a fictionalized memoir from a young lawyer who went from Harvard to a big, expensive NYC firm and found that the flip side of the massive salaries was a maniacal devotion to the billable hour. (And now it's somewhat coming back to me.) I think I was reading a bunch of lawyer books that year, for whatever reason.

And the last week of October 1998, I was reading:

• Westward Ha! by S.J. Perelman (10/30)
• Dave Barry Turns 50 by That Guy Again (10/28)
• The Joy of Work by Scott Adams (10/27)
• Dog Eat Dog by Jerry Jay Carroll (10/26)
• The Hypochondriac's Guide to Life and Death by Gene Weingarten (10/25)

The middle of my Perelman years (I'm not done with them yet, but the few books of his I haven't found yet are the really expensive early ones), and one of his better collections. Another Dave Barry book; they're short and entertaining and I can usually breeze through one in a day. The Joy of Work was a similar situation, though Adams's first non-fiction book, The Dilbert Principle, really did have genuine insights and new ideas about the world of work. (Which, of course, have since then been ground into the carpet by seven more years of daily cartoons, but that's life.) Dog Eat Dog is the not-as-good sequel to Top Dog (a great '90s novel published as fantasy, but which deserved a wider readership); still worth reading, but only after Top Dog. And I think I read Hypochondriac because Weingarten was a friend of Dave Barry's and regularly mentioned in Barry's column (so it's amusing that I read both of their books the same week). It was OK, as I recall, but just another humor book.

And the last week of October 1997, I was reading:

• Dirty Jokes and Beer by Drew Carey (10/31)
• The Growing Pains of Adrian Mole by Sue Townsend (10/31)
• Dust by Charles Pellegrino (10/30)
• The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole Aged 13 3/4 by Sue Townsend(10/30)
• Always Outnumbered, Always Outgunned by Walter Mosley (10/28)
• Vinegar Puss by S.J. Perelman (10/27)
• The Throne of Bones by Brian McNaughton (10/25)

Anybody else remember that mid-'90s boom in "books" by comedians? (No?) Jerry Seinfeld's Seinlanguage was the best of the my-act-in-a-book books that I read, but Dirty Jokes was pleasantly profane and didn't take long to read. Since I'm a reasonably fast reader, it also proved more laughs per minute than his TV show (which I also enjoyed around 1997). Secret Diary is a gem, though I suspect it's getting more and more dated as the '80s references move into the realm of history. The sequels I've read tend slowly downward, but Growing Pains was still very good. Dust was a well-constructed disaster SF novel by a guy I've bumped into at conventions (but not officially met, as far as I can remember). Always Outnumbered ... well, I don't know what I can say about a book like that, as a white guy. More good Perelman, too. The Throne of Bones was one of the few real "finds" I've had in my editorial career; it was a hardcover from a very small horror press (Terminal Frights), but I absolutely loved it. For once, the members actually seemed to respond to a book I liked (these days, they seem to avoid them), and it was a nice success in the club. The book itself is a collection of linked short stories, owing something to Lovecraft's Dream-Lands and Mythos, and more to the tone and style of Jack Vance. As far as I could tell, McNaughton had never done anything like it before or since (and he's now dead), but it's a wonderful book that should be better known.

And the last week of October 1996, I was reading:

• 3001: The Final Odyssey by Arthur C. Clarke (10/23)
• Phineas Finn by Anthony Trollope (11/5)

Broke my rule a bit, because I didn't finish anything non-comics that week in 1996, being knee-deep in Trollope. 3001 is what it is, an interesting but quiet utopian novel. Phineas Finn is one of the middle Palliser novels, which is some of my favorite Trollope (because the generic boy-girl love plots are subordinated or eliminated by more interesting political maneuvering).

And the last week of October 1995, I was reading:

• Listen to the Mockingbird by S.J. Perelman (10/31)
• Letters From London by Julian Barnes (10/30)
• One for the Morning Glory by John Barnes (10/29)
• All One Universe by Poul Anderson (10/29)
• Looking for the Mahdi by N. Lee Wood (10/28)
• Put Out More Flags by Evelyn Waugh (10/27)
• Noblesse Oblige edited by Nancy Mitford (10/26)
• Age and Guile Beat Youth, Innocence and a Bad Haircut by P.J. O'Rourke (10/25)

Yet more Perelman. I'm surprised to see Letters from London was that old; it seems much more recent in memory. I have a weakness for the occasional nonfiction and essays of novelists, and Letters scratched that itch very well. Morning Glory is a good but very untypical novel (fantasy in a Princess Bride-influence style) from another Barnes. I wonder if I read them back-to-back deliberately? All One Universe was, I think, a short story collection, though I wasn't terribly fond of any of the '90s Anderson books. Mahdi I recall enjoying, but not much more. I think More Flags was the minor Waugh novel he published during the war; it hasn't lived in memory. Noblesse was an anthology of writings about Mitford's famous essay about "U" and "non-U" styles of British speech. I'm morbidly interested in both dead literary controversies and language books, so that was a neat thing to find. And Age and Guile was a closet-cleaning collection of O'Rourke essays from twenty-five years, but it was also a big fat book with a lot of good stuff. It's not my favorite O'Rourke, but it's probably the best introduction to his work for a Democrat.

And the last week of October 1994, I was reading:

• A Conflict of Visions by Thomas Sowell (10/31)
• Red Planet Run by Dana Stabenow (10/30)
• Collected Tales, Sketches, Speeches and Essays, 1891-1910 by Mark Twain (10/27)

I was being more conscientiously Republican in the early '90s, which meant I read a couple of Sowell books. He's probably my favorite writer from the "movement;" he's witty and never loses track of the fact that life means making choices. I don't recall, exactly, what this one was, though. And, though I know who Stabenow is, I would have bet a decent sum of money that I'd never read any of her books (and I'd forgotten that she wrote some SF). This one has completely slipped from memory. The Twain book, though, I'll never forget -- that's the wonderful second volume of a marvelous collection. I was reading those two books for a long time that fall (I remember reading part of the first book in Washington Square in the city, in between helping my brother move into NYU), and they were worth spending a couple of months reading.
And the last week of October 1993, I was reading:

• The Burglar Who Traded Ted Williams by Lawrence Block (10/31)
• Iron Joe Bob by Joe Bob Briggs (10/28)
• but mostly The Birth of the Modern by Paul Johnson (11/3)

The first of the second series of "Burglar" books from Block wasn't as good as the ones that followed, but it was still very welcome. (Block's one of those writers I wish would do a couple of books a year; his are always so well-crafted and entertaining that I'd like to spend a lot more time reading his stuff.) Iron Joe Bob was a parody, I think. (And what did happen to Joe Bob, anyway? I haven't seen anything about him in a couple of years.) And Birth of the Modern is one of those books that re-arranged all of the furniture in my head, so it's hard to say anything coherent about it.

And the last week of October 1992, I was reading:

• Old Money by Nelson W. Aldrich, Jr. (10/30)
• Isaac Asimov's Caliban by Roger MacBride Allen (10/29)
• "I Love Paul Revere, Whether He Rode or Not" by Richard Shenkman (10/27)
• A Day for Damnation by David Gerrold (10/26)
• Talking God by Tony Hillerman (10/26)

Old Money is another one I don't recognize at all. Amazon says that it's a book on inherited wealth by an old-money guy, but I still don't remember it. Caliban was the first of Allen's trilogy, if I remember correctly, and was one of the best SFnal mysteries I've ever read. (The latter books were good, but not up to the same standard.) The Shenkman book was something of a precursor to his "Don't Know Much" books, with lots of little-known (or mis-known) facts about American history. I think I read the Gerrold because it looked like the Chtorr series might be completed quickly. They were decent military SF with a huge Heinlein chip on their shoulder, but I don't remember them as separate books at all. And I think I only read a couple of Hillerman's mysteries (around this time); they weren't the kind of things I usually read in that area, so I stopped reading them.

And the last week of October 1991, I was reading:

• The Memory of Earth by Orson Scott Card (10/25)
• but mostly Claudius the God by Robert Graves (11/1)
• and Anvil of Stars by Greg Bear (also 11/1)

Card's series had its good points (the villain in the second book was my particular favorite, though I don't think Card wanted me to sympathize with him as much as I did), but I didn't end up liking it very much. I think this was the fourth or fifth one. Claudius the God was excellent, but you don't need me to say that. And I really liked Anvil of Stars, though I've been expecting a third book in that series for almost fifteen years now. (And I should probably stop expecting it.)

And that's as far back as I go; I started my reading notebook with the books finished the week of 12/8/00, since I was unemployed and wanted something quantifiable to keep me from falling into complete lethargy. (The very first book listed: Afterlives, edited by Pamela Sargent and Ian Watson.)

[Post Started: 10:13 AM 10/26/05. Completed: 3:00 PM 10/30/05.]